GenAI is telling your brand’s story — with or without you
Take control of your narrative, optimize content for AI search and turn genAI into an ally, rather than a threat.
One of the surprises about the rise of artificial intelligence is the speed and rate of adoption. A study by the Federal Researve Bank of St. Louis shows genAI is being adopted at a rate of 39.5% annually. That’s twice as fast as adoption of the personal computer and even the early internet. Now that’s something.
AI’s speedy remaking of marketing presents new risks and opportunities. For brands, AI is a new rival storyteller. It is beginning to wrench narrative control from brands, often drawing on incomplete, outdated or incorrect information.
Marketing leaders must proactively safeguard their brand narratives, create an asset landscape AI can draw from and ensure that AI — and its multi-billion user reach — supports their brand stories instead of eroding them.
The opportunities and risks of genAI visibility
If you ignore generative AI and AI search, you’re ceding your opportunity to de-risk, but you’re also throwing out a new channel to reach and connect with millions of consumers. Either way, AI is already telling your story.
Let’s talk upside: the great news is that brands can actually influence what AI composes in an ethical way that ensures the whole story is told. It’s another place where you can guide consumers in their search for solutions. And there’s a proven path to controllability over AI narratives. (We’ll revisit that later.)
What about risks? There are a few big ones.
A head-in-the-sand approach to generative AI search gets you into serious hot water — total loss of brand story control, extended negative news cycles, preferred narrative contradiction, competitor hijacking and a devastating loss of trust.
This is all at a time when negative brand reputation is a critical weakness that’s proving more debilitating than ever.
Dig deeper: Why your company needs a brand LLM to thrive
How genAI shapes brand narratives
Remember when AI was just DALL-E? You could submit text and it would build a series of blurry, offputting images of Walter White from Breaking Bad eating Cup Noodles. That was January 2021.
Well, four years later, AI can create stunning works of art (Midjourney). It’s also a one-stop news destination (Perplexity), an automated search engine (AI Overviews and Google Gemini) and a do-it-all personal assistant (ChatGPT).
To put it bluntly, generative AI has the power to destroy your hard-won narrative, reputation and brand story.
How AI tells your story
How does it do it, exactly? It’s a long story, so I’ll give you the abbreviated version.
Regardless of the platform, all AI depends on massive datasets to fuel its output. AI has to be trained on something, and most use some combination of private training data and information available on the web.
Over time, between Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews and ChatGPT, AI builds on what it knows and tells its story to millions of people. If it’s saying something bad — or worse, nothing — about you, it becomes a brand story problem, then a brand trust problem and, ultimately, a revenue problem.
Brands must provide the context, content and data to AI platforms to ensure negative messages aren’t being amplified by AI Overviews and other tools.
Dig deeper: It’s time to teach AI about your brand
How to maintain narrative control
But how can you actually influence what these seemingly “black box” AI platforms produce?
Start with the content, resources and websites you control and own. Optimize these assets for relevance, visibility and user experience to influence the channels that influence AI. In other words, flood those channels with owned content and make sure it performs well.
Our research at Terakeet found that organic search is a key channel impacting what AI knows about brands. Content that performs well in Google — helpful to users, clear, accessible and ranking on page one — has a higher chance of being cited by AI Overviews and influencing AI output. When a user searches branded information for multiple clients, more than 50% of AI compositions, on average, are sourcing brand-owned content we developed.
Based on this insight and our own internal research across our portfolio, here’s how brands can win the narrative battle:
1. Start with owned and managed assets
First, optimize all brand-controlled resources for experience, technical and content performance. This means a great user interface and user experience (UI/UX), consistent experience and rankability. You should also ensure your web content is clear, accurate, current and comprehensive.
Then, create new content that addresses native user questions and provides authoritative, resourceful answers. Consider the content possibilities for your website, as well as your company profiles, social media content and press releases. All could influence your online brand narrative.
2. Invest in search performance
Brand control in the age of AI is impossible without Google Search. Implementing the full spectrum of SEO tactics is necessary if you want to impact what AI says.
Content that appears prominently and consistently in Google has a far better chance of informing what AI platforms like AI Overviews say, even getting pulled into the source links for a given answer. Building and optimizing content for human readers and the hundreds of key Google ranking factors opens the door to more direct AI influence.
Poor performance caused many to see SEO as just a minor budget line item. In reality, this fundamental investment provides downstream wins in the generative AI influence game. Without a sophisticated SEO strategy, the total loss of brand story control I mentioned can and will happen.
Dig deeper: How marketers can succeed with generative engine optimization
3. Monitor, measure and iterate
Exactly that. Build your assets, invest in search and monitor your performance in AI platforms and tools. Then, iterate and keep optimizing your strategy based on your findings.
Some key AI influence metrics our programs deploy include:
- AI answer sentiment.
- AI answer share of voice and market share.
- Mentions in AI answers.
- Link inclusion.
- Total search landscape controllability.
- Analysis of net positive or negative change.
These AI-influenced KPIs can help assess your total addressable opportunity, progress, weaknesses and what new owned assets must be created for success.
Winning the narrative battle in the age of AI search
Now is the time to build your influence and make AI an ally instead of a threat. Brands of every size across every industry should be prepared with AI risk mitigation strategies.
As a long-time CMO, I can confidently tell you that AI matters much more than many even begin to imagine. We are at the very beginning of the revolutionary age of genAI. Your overall strategy must acknowledge this reality.
Dig deeper: Guardrails and governance: How to protect your brand while using AI
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